Daniel Briere currently serves as President of Truzoka.com, a full-service cloud hosting and domain registration provider. He has worked in the Web hosting industry since 2004, and has also consulted in transportation and the financial services industry.

The term 'cloud hosting' seems to be quite trendy in today's hosting market. But what does it truly mean? The reality is that many people don't really know what cloud hosting is. To better explain what cloud hosting is, I think it's critical to explain what cloud hosting is not.

E-Commerce Times reports that Google is seeking to acquire Twitter, the wildly popular 140-character-or-less micro-blogging service. This is after the world's largest social network Facebook made an offer of $500 million ($100 million of that in cash!) for Twitter last December, which was rejected.

Popular Web hosting-oriented community WebHostingTalk (aka WHT) has suffered a severe outage since yesterday, followed by the loss of all data posted since October 2008. Site administrators state they are working on restoring failed backups and hope to have things running smoothly again in the very near future.

A question I am often asked is how to determine whether a host is fly-by-night or here to stay. In other words, how does one know whether his host will be around in 3 years when he purchases a 3-year hosting package?

Just a quick thought here on unlimited hosting: sure, there is no such thing as a hard drive with unlimited space, a common argument of those who are against unlimited hosting plans. But, have you ever heard of anyone with unlimited data?

So here's a question for you: is it possible that free hosting will ever completely displace paid hosting as the solution most personal and small-business users turn to? Is it possible that 10 years from now, a large majority of hosting accounts will either be on free shared hosting servers or dedicated servers?

Unless you've been living in a hole in the ground, chances are you've heard about (and probably participated in heated debates discussing) Web hosting overselling over the past couple of years. However, one aspect of overselling is rarely discussed: the long-term effects on the Web hosting industry.